Adelaide Crapsey
American }} Adelaide Crapsey (September 9, 1878 - October 8, 1914) was an American poet, who invented the cinquain poetry form. Life Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Crapsey was raised in Rochester, New York, the daughter of Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey (who had been transferred from New York City to Rochester), and Adelaide T. Crapsey. She attended public school in Rochester, and then Kemper Hall, an Episcopal girls' preparatory school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before entering Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she was class poet for three years and editor-in-chief of the Vassarion in 1901, the year she graduated. University of Rochester - A short biography of Adelaide Crapsey That same year her sister Emily died, and Adelaide delayed starting her teaching career for a year. In 1902 she took a position at Kemper Hall, where she taught until 1904. She then spent a year at the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome and taught for two years at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. Crapsey was in poor health starting in 1908, following her eldest brother's death in May 1907, and her father's trial for heresy in 1906, after which he was dismissed from the ministry. In 1911, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she withheld the news from her family and continued to teach at Smith until she collapsed in the summer of 1913. She then moved to a private cure cottage in Saranac Lake, New York, where she stayed for a year. In August, 1914, Crapsey returned to Rochester, where she died on October 8, 1914, at the age of 36. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. Writing In the years before her death, Crapsey wrote much of the verse on which her reputation rests. Her interest in rhythm and meter led her to create a variation on the cinquain (or quintain), a 5-line form of 22 syllables influenced by the Japanese haiku and tanka. Her cinquain has a generally iambic meter and consists of 2 syllables in the beginning and ending lines and 4, 6 and 8 syllables in the middle 3 lines, as shown in the poem NiagaraNiagara Falls Poetry Project - "Niagara". Adelaide Crapsey also formulated the established epigram into a new form of coupletDoublet - Introduction & Selections, a poem of two rhyming lines of ten syllables with an integral title. An example of this grammatical poem is her 'On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees'. The year following her death, Claude Bragdon published Verses, a posthumous selection of her cinquains and other verse forms. Revised editions were published in 1922 and 1934 and contain earlier unpublished work. Also published posthumously in 1918 was the unfinished A Study in English Metrics, a work she began during her 3-year stay in Europe. Poet Carl Sandburg was partly responsible for the continued interest in the cinquain and in keeping Crapsey from obscurity through his poem "Adelaide Crapsey". Recognition Her papers are at the University of Rochester Library archives.http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=838 Publications Poetry *''Verse. Rochester, NY: Manas Press, 1915. ** enlarged edition, New York: Knopf, 1922 ** enlarged & revised edition, 1934. Non-fiction *A Study in English Metrics. New York: Knopf, 1918; Boston: Longwood Press, 1978. Collected editions *''The Complete Poems and Collected Letters (edited by Susan Sutton Smith). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.Adelaide Crapsey 1878-1914, Poetry Foundation, Web, Aug. 27, 2012. Short Stories * * Songs * (reprint Publisher Boosey & Hawkes, 1986) * * See also *List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *'On Seeing Weather-beaten Trees' - Example of Adelaide Crapsey's doublet form of couplet *Five cinquains: "November Night," "Susanna and the Elders," "Triad," "Niagara," "The Warning" *Adelaide Crapsey in The New Poetry: An anthology: "Fate Defied," "The Pledge," "Expenses," "Adventure," "Dirge," "Song," "The Lonely Death" * Selected Poetry of Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) (10 poems) at Representative Poetry Online. *Adelaide Crapsey 1878-1914 at the Poetry Foundation *28 cinquains from Adelaide Crapsey's Verse *Adelaide Crapsey at PoemHunter. (99 poems) ;Audio / video *Adelaide Crapsey at YouTube *Adelaide Crapsey at Vimeo ;Books *[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/BAE8954.0001.001?view=toc Verse by Adelaide Crapsey] at American Verse Project *Adelaide Crapsey at Amazon.com ;About *Adelaide Crapsey in the Encyclopædia Britannica *Alone in the Dawn: The life of Adelaide Crapsey by Karen Alkalay-Gut *"The Poems of Adelaide Crapsey" by Karen Alkalay-Gut *A photograph of Adelaide Crapsey during her last year at Saranac Lake ;Etc. *Adelaide Crapsey Papers, collected at University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries, Dept. of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation. Collection register and Collection description. *"DISCOVERING ADELAIDE CRAPSEY: CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT", Karen Alkalay-Gut Category:American poets Category:Writers from New York Category:American literary critics Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:1878 births Category:1914 deaths Category:Burials at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester Category:People from Rochester, New York Category:Vassar College alumni Category:Infectious disease deaths in New York Category:20th-century poets Category:Poets Category:English-language poets Category:Women poets Category:20th-century women writers